Joyce Johnson
Ann Douglas
© Tremaine George
Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in Washington Heights, in New York City. As a child, she was trained in classical music and performed on Broadway. She later studied at Barnard College. Her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, was published in 1962, when she was 26. She has published two other novels, Bad Connections (1978), and In the Night Cafe (1983).
While at Barnard, Joyce befriended Elise Cowen, Lucien Carr, Allan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, of the Beat movement. She wrote about this time in her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. A collection of her coorespondence with Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair, was published in 2000; her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, was published in 2008.
In 1990, Joyce published What Lisa Knew, a book-length investigation of her extensive reporting for Vanity Fair on the domestic murder of 6-year-old Lisa Steinberg. In 2005, she published Missing Men, a memoir about her childhood, her mother, and her two marriages, a book that, in her own words, “shaped itself around absences.”
Joyce’s fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in Harper’s, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. She lives and works in New York City.
Recent press:
The New Yorker
NPR Fresh Air
The New York Times
Vanity Fair